I know that the OS will sometimes initialise memory with certain patterns such as 0xCD and 0xDD. What I want to know is when and why this happens.

When

Is this specific to the compiler used?

Do malloc/new and free/delete work in the same way with regard to this?

Is it platform specific?

Will it occur on other operating systems, such as Linux or VxWorks?

Why

My understanding is this only occurs in Win32 debug configuration, and it is used to detect memory overruns and to help the compiler catch exceptions.

Can you give any practical examples as to how this initialisation is useful?

I remember reading something (maybe in Code Complete 2) that it is good to initialise memory to a known pattern when allocating it, and certain patterns will trigger interrupts in Win32 which will result in exceptions showing in the debugger.

8 Answers
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A quick summary of what Microsoft's compilers use for various bits of unowned/uninitialized memory when compiled for debug mode (support may vary by compiler version):

Value Name Description
------ -------- -------------------------
0xCD Clean Memory Allocated memory via malloc or new but never
written by the application.
0xDD Dead Memory Memory that has been released with delete or free.
Used to detect writing through dangling pointers.
0xED or Aligned Fence 'No man's land' for aligned allocations. Using a
0xBD different value here than 0xFD allows the runtime
to detect not only writing outside the allocation,
but to also detect mixing alignment-specific
allocation/deallocation routines with the regular
ones.
0xFD Fence Memory Also known as "no mans land." This is used to wrap
the allocated memory (surrounding it with a fence)
and is used to detect indexing arrays out of
bounds or other accesses (especially writes) past
the end (or start) of an allocated block.
0xFD or Buffer slack Used to fill slack space in some memory buffers
0xFE (unused parts of `std::string` or the user buffer
passed to `fread()`). 0xFD is used in VS 2005 (maybe
some prior versions, too), 0xFE is used in VS 2008
and later.
0xCC When the code is compiled with the /GZ option,
uninitialized variables are automatically assigned
to this value (at byte level).
// the following magic values are done by the OS, not the C runtime:
0xAB (Allocated Block?) Memory allocated by LocalAlloc().
0xBAADF00D Bad Food Memory allocated by LocalAlloc() with LMEM_FIXED,but
not yet written to.
0xFEEEFEEE OS fill heap memory, which was marked for usage,
but wasn't allocated by HeapAlloc() or LocalAlloc().
Or that memory just has been freed by HeapFree().

Disclaimer: the table is from some notes I have lying around - they may not be 100% correct (or coherent).

Many of these values are defined in vc/crt/src/dbgheap.c:

/*
* The following values are non-zero, constant, odd, large, and atypical
* Non-zero values help find bugs assuming zero filled data.
* Constant values are good so that memory filling is deterministic
* (to help make bugs reproducable). Of course it is bad if
* the constant filling of weird values masks a bug.
* Mathematically odd numbers are good for finding bugs assuming a cleared
* lower bit.
* Large numbers (byte values at least) are less typical, and are good
* at finding bad addresses.
* Atypical values (i.e. not too often) are good since they typically
* cause early detection in code.
* For the case of no-man's land and free blocks, if you store to any
* of these locations, the memory integrity checker will detect it.
*
* _bAlignLandFill has been changed from 0xBD to 0xED, to ensure that
* 4 bytes of that (0xEDEDEDED) would give an inaccessible address under 3gb.
*/
static unsigned char _bNoMansLandFill = 0xFD; /* fill no-man's land with this */
static unsigned char _bAlignLandFill = 0xED; /* fill no-man's land for aligned routines */
static unsigned char _bDeadLandFill = 0xDD; /* fill free objects with this */
static unsigned char _bCleanLandFill = 0xCD; /* fill new objects with this */

There are also a few times where the debug runtime will fill buffers (or parts of buffers) with a known value, for example the 'slack' space in std::string's allocation or the buffer passed to fread(). Those cases use a value given the name _SECURECRT_FILL_BUFFER_PATTERN (defined in crtdefs.h). I'm not sure exactly when it was introduced, but it was in the debug runtime by at least VS 2005 (VC++8).

Initially the value used to fill these buffers was 0xFD - the same value used for no man's land. However, in VS 2008 (VC++9) the value was changed to 0xFE. I assume that's because there could be situations where the fill operation would run past the end of the buffer, for example if the caller passed in a buffer size that was too large to fread(). In that case, the value 0xFD might not trigger detecting this overrun since if the buffer size was too large by just one, the fill value would be the same as the no man's land value used to initialize that canary. No change in no man's land means the overrun wouldn't be noticed.

So the fill value was changed in VS 2008 so that such a case would change the no man's land canary, resulting in detection of the problem by the runtime.

As others have noted, one of the key properties of these values is that is a pointer variable with one of these values is dereferenced, it will result in an access violation, since on a standard 32-bit Windows configuration, user mode addresses will not go higher than 0x7fffffff.

One nice property about the fill value 0xCCCCCCCC is that in x86 assembly, the opcode 0xCC is the int3 opcode, which is the software breakpoint interrupt. So, if you ever try to execute code in uninitialized memory that's been filled with that fill value, you'll immediately hit a breakpoint, and the operating system will let you attach a debugger (or kill the process).

It's compiler and OS specific, Visual studio sets different kinds of memory to different values so that in the debugger you can easily see if you have overun into into malloced memory, a fixed array or an uninitialised object.
Somebody will post the details while I am googling them...

It's not the OS - it's the compiler. You can modify the behaviour too - see down the bottom of this post.

Microsoft Visual Studio generates (in Debug mode) a binary that pre-fills stack memory with 0xCC. It also inserts a space between every stack frame in order to detect buffer overflows. A very simple example of where this is useful is here (in practice Visual Studio would spot this problem and issue a warning):

If Visual Studio didn't preinitialise variables to a known value, then this bug could potentially be hard to find. With preinitialised variables (or rather, preinitialised stack memory), the problem is reproducible on every run.

However, there is a slight problem. The value Visual Studio uses is TRUE - anything except 0 would be. It is actually quite likely that when you run your code in Release mode that unitialised variables may be allocated to a piece of stack memory that happens to contain 0, which means you can have an unitialised variable bug which only manifests itself in Release mode.

That annoyed me, so I wrote a script to modify the pre-fill value by directly editing the binary, allowing me to find uninitalized variable problems that only show up when the stack contains a zero. This script only modifies the stack pre-fill; I never experimented with the heap pre-fill, though it should be possible. Might involve editing the run-time DLL, might not.

And then you instantiate one a Foo and call SomeFunction, it will give an access violation trying to read 0xCDCDCDCD. This means that you forgot to initialize something. That's the why part. If not, then the pointer might have lined up with some other memory, and it would be more difficult to debug. It's just letting you know the reason that you get an access violation. Note that this case was pretty simple, but in a bigger class it's easy to make that mistake.

AFAIK, this only works on the visual studio compiler when in debug mode (as opposed to release)

It's to easily see that memory has changed from its initial starting value, generally during debugging but sometimes for release code as well, since you can attach debuggers to the process while it's running.

It's not just memory either, many debuggers will set register contents to a sentinel value when the process starts (AIX sets its registers to 0xdeadbeef which is mildly humorous).